zimpy27 wrote:That's a lot worse than I imagined considering Bulls won each of these finals series and he played so many minutes..
I think +6.2 ON is actually extremely good for the finals. Let’s remember that the Bulls were playing great teams and may have won every series but they typically went to 6 games, so the other teams were still winning games.
Tim Duncan is the only person I can think of in the last 50 years that played in a lot of Finals and might plausibly have a similar ON rating in the Finals. Some quick math using basketball-reference +/- numbers tells me Duncan’s ON rating per 48 minutes in the Finals was a little below these numbers for Jordan (+5.60), but per-100-possession numbers are a little higher than per-48-minutes, so Duncan is surely very similar to Jordan in per-100-possession terms (perhaps very slightly ahead). And, perhaps not coincidentally, their teams had virtually identical winning percentages in the Finals (68% and 69%). I’ll note that even if going back further, given the Celtics’ average margin of victory in the games Bill Russell played, the high minutes he played, and the super high pace of that era, it’s essentially certain Bill Russell had a lower ON rating in the Finals than Jordan. In Finals games Russell played, the Celtics outscored their opponents by 338 points. Russell played 3181 minutes in those games and missed 218 minutes. And the Celtics’ pace in those years averaged 125.8. Even if we assume only 120 pace in the Finals, the Celtics would’ve needed to be around -29.0 per 100 possessions with Russell off the court for Russell to have had the ON rating per 100 possessions that Jordan had. Obviously, that’s extremely unlikely. Of course, this is not exact math (since pace might’ve been a little different with Russell on and off the court), but the basic message is the same: It is virtually certain that Bill Russell’s ON rating in the Finals was lower than Jordan’s.
Furthermore, let’s remember that Jordan was doing this against some really great teams. Jordan’s Finals opponents averaged 6.84 SRS in those seasons, and had major stars on their teams that were typically sharing the court in Jordan’s minutes. For reference, Duncan’s Finals opponents averaged only 3.95 SRS, while Russell’s Finals opponents averaged just 2.17 SRS. I’d say putting up a similar ON rating in the Finals to this board’s #5 all-time player and almost certainly a higher ON rating in the Finals than this board’s #4 all-time player, while playing against Finals opponents that were substantially stronger is extremely impressive. Not surprising, since we know his teams won every Finals he was in, but it’s definitely GOAT-like. The bottom line is that, when adjusted for opponent SRS (i.e. raw ON rating + Opponent SRS), I think Jordan’s Finals ON rating is almost certainly the highest of anyone in history that played in a bunch of Finals, and it’s likely not even particularly close. These numbers are *extremely* impressive, but are just unsurprising since we already know about Jordan’s incredible Finals dominance.
Personally, I find the OFF rating here a bit less interesting, just because the minutes sample is inherently so low. Obviously, the Bulls did very well with Jordan off the court in a couple series and very badly in others, but the minutes sample in individual series is tiny and even the total minutes across all Finals is too low to draw a real conclusion from IMO.
